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World Wind Tools Reveal Environmental Change

Saturday, 01 January 2011

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NASA Technology

“Who has more satellite data than NASA?”
asks Patrick Hogan.

The question is a rhetorical one. After
dozens of Earth-observing satellite launches and missions
to other planets, NASA has accumulated an unmatched
amount of planetary science information, including satellite
imagery, terrain information, and climate data. To
visualize this data and make it accessible, in 2002 Hogan
and his colleagues at Ames Research Center started building
a software program called World Wind.

Originally developed under NASA’s Learning
Technologies program as a tool to engage and inspire
students, World Wind aspired to help NASA move 3D
visualization of NASA data into the classroom, using
videogame-like virtual globes of Earth, Moon, Venus,
Mars, and Jupiter.

In 2005, shortly after the release of World Wind, the
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was impressed by the
technology at a geographic information systems (GIS)
conference. “At the time, World Wind was an Internet
application, specific to the Windows platform. DOE
wanted something cross-platform,” says Hogan, World
Wind project manager at Ames.

With support from DOE, Hogan and his team
designed World Wind to be a technology that others
could simply plug into their application, rather than an
application that required others to plug into it. This redesign
is the World Wind Java Software Development Kit
(SDK) and the Web Mapping Services (WMS) Server.
Currently, there are over a million requests for World
Wind data each day.

Partnership

Released under the NASA Open Source Agreement
(NOSA) license, anyone is permitted to use World Wind
for their purposes, with one caveat: According to the
license, if a user changes the SDK or WMS Server, the
code changes fall under the NOSA and need to be made
open and available.

Hogan describes World Wind as enabling government,
commercial enterprise, and individual developers to focus
on their needs, without having to “recreate the wheel” for
3D visualization. “We’re providing the essential infrastructure
for spatial data so others can make their data
come alive in a virtual world. This allows those people to
concentrate on information intelligence and data analysis.
We make it possible to see the information in its native
concept of the real world.” As a testament to the software’s
success, World Wind was awarded the prestigious
NASA “Software of the Year” for 2009.

One of the companies currently making use of the
NASA technology is Honolulu, Hawaii-based Intelesense
Technologies (Spinoff 2007). Started by Stanford
University and former NASA engineers to provide
global monitoring services, today the company uses the technology for environmental, public health, and other
monitoring applications for nonprofit organizations and
government agencies.

Benefits

Intelesense develops wireless sensor networks that
support its three integrated global monitoring products
and services: InteleCell, a dedicated data acquisition platform
that communicates data from the sensors through
the Internet; InteleNet, a real-time distributed mesh
network that integrates data from different sources; and
InteleView, a secure GIS-based 3D visualizer based on
NASA’s World Wind.

According to Kevin Montgomery, the chief executive
officer of Intelesense, by not having to develop a technology
like NASA’s World Wind, the company has saved
approximately $1 million in costs. After adopting World
Wind 4 years ago, the company significantly enhanced the
technology. “We’ve added security features like authentication,
advanced visualization features, and linked it to
our server cluster that has hundreds of thousands of layers
and other capabilities,” says Montgomery.
Some of the applications for Intelesense’s system
include monitoring climate change, air quality, security,
and public health.

Question of the Week

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